Powerful rising trends of mobile media platforms have also resulted in the escalation of users’ privacy concerns. However, there is a paradox between users’ attitudes towards privacy and their actual privacy disclosure behaviors. This study attempts to explain the phenomenon of privacy paradox in the mobile social media context from the privacy fatigue perspective. Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and employing the method of Propensity Score Matching (PSM), this paper confirmed that privacy fatigue could directly explain the privacy paradox. Among the findings, cynicism turned the relationship between privacy concern and privacy protection behaviors from positive influence to negative influence, while emotional exhaustion would weaken the positive influence relationship between privacy concern and the intention to undertake privacy protection behaviors. In addition, the study also revealed the heterogeneous effects of individual characteristics and usage characteristics variables on how the privacy fatigue influences privacy paradox.

This paper aims to examine the net effect of privacy fatigue of social media users on privacy protection disengagement behaviour, which is helpful to address the users’ privacy issue in the new stage of social media digitalization. Applying the Propensity Score Matching(PSM) methodology, the authors conduct the data analysis of 1,734 samples of social media users and eliminates the selectivity error caused by individual characteristic variables so as to improve the prediction accuracy of variable causality. Their research not only validates the causal relationship between privacy fatigue and privacy protection disengagement, proving that privacy fatigue can directly lead to privacy protection disengagement behaviour but also reveals that the individual characteristic variables have heterogeneous effects on the influence of privacy fatigue on protection disengagement behaviour.

No abstract